1. Field
The embodiments of the present disclosure relates to the field of image processing, and, in particular, to an image processing device and an image processing method for determining a position of a branch point between a trachea and bronchi, as well as an image processing device and an image processing method for determining a lung region.
2. Description of the Related Art
The background part provides background information related to the present disclosure, which is not necessarily the conventional technology.
In determining a three-dimensional shape of a lung, three-dimensional marking points of the lung, including a branch point between a main trachea and bronchi as well as an upper edge and a lower edge of a left lung and an upper edge and a lower edge a right lung, are used. In the existing method for detecting a branch point of a main trachea and bronchi, a trachea region is extracted from a three-dimensional image of a whole lung, and then a skeleton structure of the trachea is analyzed by a thinning algorithm, so that a connection point between skeletons of the main trachea and primary bronchi is determined as a branch point. With this method, in order to extract the trachea region, a seed point for region growth is to be selected manually, which is not suitable for processing a large amount of image data. In addition, high robustness cannot be achieved with the thinning algorithm, thereby resulting in a noise on the skeleton structure of the trachea and an erroneous detection to the branch point.
In the existing method for detecting an upper edge and a lower edge of a lung, pixels having gray values within a certain range are extracted in the lung image as a lung region, to determine the upper edge and the lower edge of the lung region. With this method, only information on gray of the pixels is taken into account, resulting in that other portions having similar information on gray, such as an intestine region, may be identified as the lung region, the regions detected erroneously may affect the detection on the upper edge and the lower edge of the lung.
For the above technical problem, it is desirable in the present disclosure to propose a scheme, to accurately detect a position of a branch point and a lung region.